despite - or because - of its tremendous growth, the World Wide Web suffers
from one big problem: navigation in hyperspace.

in the current implementation of the Web with URLs as THE mechanism to link
documents, the "lost in hyperspace" problem is inherit. there is no
way to get information about document contents and links efficiently.

the only reasonable approach i have seen so far is
Hyper-G. in Hyper-G, the link
information is stored in a database and therefore is separated from the HTML
document. but i would like to go one step further: the database should not only
store information about the links, but also some metadata about the document
itself (e.g. author, title, keywords and so on, as it is done in library
retrieval systems). let me use the expression FutureWeb for
such a system. it is mandatory that an editing tool would help to provide the
information needed for each document. the whole system must not relay on
manually feed databases.

FutureWeb broswers must be capable of querying such a
database, so that users can find documents about particular subjects. as a next
step, the databases of the various FutureWeb servers must be
linked together. this would allow world wide queries regardless of where a
document is actually stored.
because there are thousands of WWW servers around, it would be impossible to
distribute each query to each server. therefore, i envision specialized
FutureWeb hubs which continually collect information provided
by FutureWeb servers and store it in their databases. there
might be five to ten FutureWeb hubs world wide. each
FutureWeb server sends its update information to at least one
FutureWeb Hub. the FutureWeb hubs in turn
update each other's database periodically.

FutureWeb clients would be configured to send their
queries to a FutureWeb Hub. more precisely, each
FutureWeb client should have a list of FutureWeb
hubs where it can send queries to, a scheme very similar to the Domain
Name Service (DNS). to reduce the load of the FutureWeb hubs
and network traffic, it might be reasonable to introduce two scopes of queries,
"local" and "world wide". "local" queries would
be handled by a configurable list of FutureWeb servers, while
only "world wide" queries would be answered by FutureWeb
hubs.